“I don’t see,” I said, “why you have to be so proud.”
“Proud?”
She turned round, her eyes very dark and large, and looked at me in fury.
“How dare you call me proud?” she said.
I stared back at her. I think I was amazed that anyone who a moment or two before had been laughing with me could suddenly become so angry.
Then, to my own very great surprise, my nervousness went from me.
I walked towards her, and stood beside her.
“I shall call you proud,” I said,
“I shall go further, and I shall call you damnably proud.
It is not you who is likely to be humiliated but me.
It was not a joke, when you said that about giving lessons in Italian.
Your answer came far too swiftly for it to be a joke.
You said it, because you meant it.”
“And if I did mean it?” she said.
“Is there anything shameful in giving lessons in Italian?”
“In the ordinary sense, no,” I said, “but in your case, yes.
For Mrs. Ambrose Ashley to give lessons in Italian is shameful; it reflects upon the husband who neglected to make provision for her in his will.
And I, Philip Ashley, his heir, won’t permit it.
You will take that allowance every quarter, cousin Rachel, and when you draw the money from the bank, please remember that it does not come from the estate, nor from the heir to the estate, but from your husband, Ambrose Ashley.”
A wave of anger, as great as hers, had come over me as I spoke.
I was damned if any creature, small and frail, should stand there and accuse me of humiliating her; and I was damned furthermore if she should refuse the money that belonged to her by right.
“Well? Do you understand what I have been saying to you?” I said.
For one moment I thought she was going to hit me.
She stood quite still, staring up at me.
Then her eyes filled with tears, and pushing past me she went into the bedroom and slammed the door.
I walked downstairs. I went to the dining room and rang the bell and told Seecombe that I thought Mrs. Ashley would not be down for dinner.
I poured myself out a glass of claret, and sat down alone at the head of the table.
Christ! I thought, so that’s how women behave. I had never felt so angry, nor so spent.
Long days in the open, working with the men at harvest time; arguments with tenants behindhand with their rent or involved in some quarrel with a neighbor which I had to settle; nothing of this could compare to five minutes with a woman whose mood of gaiety had turned in a single instant to hostility.
And was the final weapon always tears?
Because they knew full well the effect upon the watcher?
I had another glass of claret.
As to Seecombe, who hovered at my elbow, I could have wished him a world away.
“Is Madam indisposed, sir, do you think?” he asked me.
I might have told him that Madam was not so much indisposed as in a fury, and would probably ring her bell in a moment and demand Wellington and the carriage to take her back to Plymouth.
“No,” I said, “her hair is not yet dry.
You had better tell John to take a tray up to the boudoir.”
This, I supposed, was what men faced when they were married.
Slammed doors, and silence.
Dinner alone.
So that appetite, whipped up by the long day’s outing, and the relaxation of the bathtub, and the pleasure of a tranquil evening by the fire passed in intermittent conversation, watching with lazy ease hands that were white and small against embroidery, had to simmer down.
With what cheerfulness had I dressed for dinner and walked along the corridor, knocked on the boudoir door and found her sitting on the stool in that white wrapper, with her hair pinned on top of her head. How easy the mood we shared, making a kind of intimacy that gave a glow to the whole prospect of the evening. And now, alone at the table, with a beefsteak that might have been shoe-leather for all I cared.
And what was she doing?
Lying on her bed?
Were the candles snuffed, the curtains drawn, and the room in darkness?
Or was the mood over now, and did she sit sedately in the boudoir, dry-eyed, eating her dinner off the tray, to make a show for Seecombe?
I did not know.
I did not care.
Ambrose had been so right when he used to say that women were a race apart.
One thing was certain now.